Sweet as!

Page Tools

Making chocolate is more than mixing using cocoa, butterfat and
milk. You have to consider the production lines, and all the people
who do the office support work and sell the stuff.

Such is the challenge of Jill Alexander, New Zealand IT manager
for Cadbury in Dunedin.

As MIS noted in its recent "Living the Lifestyle" feature (June
2005) Alexander sees herself as being lucky in having a diverse job
while enjoying the outdoor life in Otago.

Hailing from Palmerston North, Alexander came to Cadbury 18
years ago in an IT support role before working her way up.

Now, she heads a team of six IT staffmembers in Dunedin, plus
one in Auckland, where UK-owned Cadbury has its Pascall
confectionary centre and runs the commercial side of the
business.

Alexander runs the countrys IT from Dunedin, reporting to
an ANZ relationship manager in Melbourne, a regional office which
also offers a regional team when needed.

"This is a reasonably new innovation, offering an interface
between IT and the business. Previously, I just reported to IT and
the change has been successful as having someone with knowledge of
business knowledge and IT means you dont get the disconnect,"
she explains.

The smallness of Cadburys IT group means it becomes a very
cross-functional group by default.

"The team is involved in many areas - support, maintenance,
projects - pretty much the normal roles you would expect. Each of
the team does have a specialist area, but I am happy to say all are
really good at rolling up their sleeves and getting involved
wherever needed," Alexander continues.

Cadbury, which employs 650 in Dunedin, is a Microsoft shop with
HP preferred for its 300 PCs, servers and printers.

The company has two main business applications - SAP for
financials, warehousing, sales and distribution; plus Prism for
manufacturing.

Radio frequency equipment is used in warehouses, either
hand-held or on shelves, to pick orders and help forklift staff
find the right bays.

"This has been installed for many years now and still provides
the necessary automation to keep our warehouses running
efficiently," she says.

Dunedin has a centralised help desk that logs calls, which are
then allocated to appropriate team members, part of whose daily
workload involves handling these calls.

Team members also spend time on internet and intranet
development, remote access, system and user security, cellular and
landline phones and communications work.

"It can be a big ask for a small team, but you can be assured
theres never a dull or empty moment," she says.

Much of their work is currently hands-on but it is moving more
towards planning and strategy as simple help desk tasks are
centralised to Australia.

"There are economies of scale where it can be done remotely.
Its amazing how much time is wasted on simple help desk calls
that can be done from one central team," says Alexander.

Indeed, being part of a multinational presents other challenges
and opportunities. "Mainly because theres another dimension
to consider at all times, over and above just working on the local
direction," she continues.

The global advantage
"Probably the biggest challenge is to remember that when were
looking at a new project we dont usually have to recreate the
wheel from scratch because theres bound to be another site
somewhere in the world whos done a similar thing.

This sounds logical but it is easy to get locally focused and
forget to draw on the worldwide resources available," Alexander
says.

The New Zealand business is part of Cadburys Asia-Pacific
region with Australia and New Zealand working as one business unit.
And through this, everybody eventually reports to the UK.

Indeed, it was using the experience of Cadburys Claremont
factory in Tasmania that helped the Dunedin business create Cadbury
World three years ago. The New Zealand operations had no experience
of tourism systems, but the Tasmanian centre provided Dunedin a
good understanding of the processes required to operate a visitor
centre that offers a tour covering all aspects of making chocolate,
a chocolate waterfall and a retail outlet.

"We needed a system where our scheduled tours could be
automatically populated in the system, including the various ticket
options, guide rostering, and a quick and easy calendar system to
quickly locate and identify available tours when people called to
book their Cadbury World tour," Alexander explains.

The system also needed to work with systems used by other
tourism operators, have a robust retail system to handle purchases
in the Cadbury World shop, and have good back-office
capability.

While SAP is used within Cadbury in general, issues like tourist
invoicing meant another system was called for, one that was easy to
use and was from a company that was continually upgrading and
developing it, so when Dunedin wants to offer web-based booking,
the software can cope.

This meant Cadbury settled for Intouch Technologies, from Perth,
Western Australia, which also supplied the POS, reservations and
related software to the Claremont attraction.

"One of our requirements was it had to be integrated (with our
other systems). It became a simple and reliable process," Alexander
explains.

Touch screens were used for both retail and tour bookings, with
reliability a critical factor to help the new facility cope with
more than 60,000 visitors a year.

Cadbury World has just celebrated its third birthday, with
Alexander claiming an excellent performance from its hardware and
software systems, the latter of which are about to undergo their
first major upgrade. InTouchs "excellent" support and staff
who were "passionate" over the project were other factors behind
the centres claimed success.

Looking back, however, Alexander doubts Cadbury really
comprehended the total dependency on the systems and the continual
usage.

"With the need for immediate response times when booking tours,
we did find the communications systems were being stretched at
times and relatively soon after opening we upgraded the lines
(moving to high level fibre and having dedicated lines) to overcome
this.

"Our retail sales were okay as they ran on the local PC, but
bookings have to go back to a single source to receive current
information on tour availability so this created an increase in
traffic on the line.

"With the upcoming upgrade, were also increasing the
redundancy, to ensure ongoing reliability and availability," she
explains.

Alexander was part of the main seven to eight staff project
management team and oversaw the IT installations, the hardware,
software and communications.

Typically, Cadbury follows a standard project
process - the size of the project determining its level of project
management. A recent project involved synchronising clocks
throughout the Dunedin site.

"In this instance, the idea template is provided. From there,
the project is scoped out, covering the normal project areas of
cost, time, resource, business impact and benefits. Once the
project is officially signed off, detailed planning is
undertaken.

"This might sound simple with clock installations, but when
youre working in a food manufacturing environment, there are
many safety and quality considerations all impacting on the flow of
the project. And then after installation is completed, theres
the close-off of the project financially and the post-review," she
explains.

Another recent project included issuing sales staff with iPaq
hand-helds giving them up-to-date information on customers,
products and promotions. The sales staff enter and receive
information on their iPaqs, which is then transmitted via their
mobile phones.

Alexander says this project has speeded up processes and saved
staff from carrying around much paper-based information, such as
forms.

Sitting in a wood-panelled office reminiscent of a gingerbread
house in a fairy tale, Alexander offers a few final observations on
her role.

"My role in IT is what I would consider to be business focused
rather than technical, so I still shudder when friends have an
expectation I can fix their home PC for them."

And she has a range of interests outside work - not looking at
PCs - but running, skiing and windsurfing, now that spring is here.
"Ive got a PC in the house and it serves its purpose for my
kids and myself but it is not on all day, everyday."